'Outsider' artist Bob Justin finds inspiration in the darndest stuff

'Outsider' artist Bob Justin finds inspiration in the darndest stuff

Jan. 2, 2014

Art gave Bob Justin a new lease on life. 'My whole life up until 1991 was pure tension. It was survival. In 1993, I started making my guys, and it all went away,' he said. 'Everything I had chased all my life, I found.' / Jason Towlen/Asbury Park Press

One of Bob Justin's 'Critters?' Or is it the Jersey Devil? / Peter Ackerman/Staff Photographer

More

ADVERTISEMENT

They say Michelangelo could look at a block of Carrara marble and see David, or Moses, or the Pieta trapped inside, waiting to be set free.

Something like that happens when “found object” artist Bob Justin makes the rounds at the flea markets and antique shows, where he hunts for his raw materials — and inspiration.

There’s no telling what might be his muse. Old bed pans, a box of dental molds, a doll’s head, a tractorless tractor seat.

Justin, 73, of Hamilton in Mercer County, sees something in these cast-off oddments that the rest of us can’t. His wheels are already spinning even before he’s done haggling over the sale price.

Once he gets back to his workshop, located in a repurposed old Army barrack on the grounds of the New Egypt Flea Market Village in Plumsted, Ocean County, Bob Justin the artist morphs into Dr. Frankenstein, animator of the inanimate.

In his hands, door knobs, railroad spikes, toilet plunger heads and myriad thingamabobs whose original function will keep some poor archaeologist awake at night centuries from now trying to figure out, are reborn as ... well, it’s difficult to describe, exactly.

It’s called “outsider” art, as in outside the mainstream, but somehow that descriptor seems too conventional for the likes of Bob Justin, whose edgy, charismatic creations — masks, three-dimensional figures, bronze sculptures, sketches and finger paintings, heavy on hermaphroditic features — have been widely shown and collected since he burst onto the New Jersey art scene 20 years ago.

Oh, it’s out there, all right. If “mainstream” were the Earth, Justin would be one of Jupiter’s moons.

“He’s just . . . he’s crazy. Have you met him? Oh, my god,” said his friend and fellow artist Dion Hitchings, whose Outsider Art Gallery in Frenchtown, Hunterdon County, features several of Justin’s works.

'A different person'

Like his art, Justin was something else, once.

Rootless. Restless. “The most arrogant, nasty sonofabitch in the world,” to use his words.

Raised in Keyport, Monmouth County, he was kicked out of high school at 16 (“I hit the English teacher”) and got booted from the Marine Corps (he almost, accidentally, shot his commanding officer). After that he spent decades pinballing from one job to another.

“I’ve had over 300 jobs,” calculated Justin, who has had stints as a real estate agent, Cadillac sales manager, and the head of his own executive search firm, among many other fleeting pursuits. One job, at a smelting plant, lasted all of 47 minutes, he says.

“I’ve done everything but grow up and get pregnant,” Justin said with a laugh. “The funny part of it is, I never found a job I really liked, and I never found one that liked me."

A hawkish, balding man who wears a broad-brimmed straw hat and speaks with a folksy, Jersey twang, Justin is known as “Wild Man” and “Psycho Bob” on the flea market circuit.

“They don’t know me,” he said.

Maybe not, but he looks the part. Had Hollywood ever caught up to him while he was between jobs, he could have made a terrific cowboy and possibly an even better villain.

Justin says his own transformation from serial job-killer to sought-after folk artist began when he met Beverly, his wife of 26 years.

“When I met Bev, I started changing, I started evolving, and I became a different person,” he explained. “That’s when I started going in the woods, I started hiking, I bought a canoe, I started relaxing. I became a completely different person.”

A heart attack in 1991 hastened things along. Too weak to work and flat broke, he began selling off his prized collection of antique hand tools at flea markets. It was during one of these forays in 1993 that he bought a chair bottom for a buck. Then he found an iron ring and a broken pickaxe and arranged the objects together.

The finished product, or “assemblage,” made him smile.

“I said: ‘Look at this. It looks like a Texas longhorn.’ ”

He meant it just to be an ornament for his truck and was gobsmacked when someone offered him 75 bucks for it — so much so he told the guy to get lost, repeatedly.

Justin told him it was junk. The prospective buyer, who turned out to be a serious collector, insisted it was art. In the end, cold cash settled the argument.

Though still skeptical, Justin created more flea market mashups, a table full of them. And darn if somebody didn’t come along and buy every one of them.

“What do I do now? It’s only 9:30 in the morning,” an incredulous Justin asked a friend who was with him that day.

His friend’s sage advice: Go home, and make more.

Attached to his 'guys'

Art wound up being the golden key that unlocked Justin’s life.

It brought him a measure of fame, it’s true.

His work soon created a sensation among folk art enthusiasts, including the late Kristina Johnson, an influential trustee for the American Museum of Folk Art in New York City and the ex-wife of sculptor J. Seward Johnson II, who also bought one of Justin’s pieces. Another renowned sculptor, the late Isaac Witkin, became Justin’s good friend and mentor.

Justin’s work wound up on a two-year goodwill tour of Africa and has been featured in some important galleries and juried art shows in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Some of his pieces are part of the New Jersey State Museum’s permanent collection.

“It was so varied, and it was really good,” said Michelle Quigley, a Collingswood antiques dealer and longtime friend who owns about a dozen of Justin’s pieces.

“So many of the assemblages (from other outside artists) are really schlocky and obvious,” she said. “His (work) has always had a lot of heart and soul to it, and a tremendous amount of elegance, on par with anything you’d see in a museum.”

Art gave Justin something greater than notoriety, though.

“My whole life up until 1991 was pure tension. It was survival. In 1993, I started making my guys, and it all went away,” he said.

“Everything I had chased all my life, I found.

“It was the first time in my life,” he said, “that I felt like I belonged.”

His “guys,” or “critters,” are what Justin affectionately calls the whimsical faces and figures that have continued to spring from his prodigious imagination, despite years of heart and lung ailments.

“I know it sounds corny and all, but I hate to sell any of them, and I’m always surprised when somebody wants to buy one. I'm like, ‘Really?’ ”

Each piece has a name — and a personality every bit as colorful as Justin’s.

“ ‘Saturday Night’ got sold, unfortunately,” he remembered with a sigh. “I wish I had it back. I wish I had every one of them back.”

Everything he creates, he says, is a self-portrait. One of the pieces that Quigley owns, called “Soldier,” has one of Justin’s old oxygen masks for a face. Its body is filled with bottles of his many medications and wrapped with tubing from the oxygen tank that helps keep Justin alive.

“You can see through (the ‘Soldier’) and see that he’s wracked with pain,” Quigley said. “It’s just amazing.”

Inspiration strikes

Over the years, Justin’s poor health has been both a wellspring of creativity and a real pain in the butt. Late in the summer, he spent a week in the hospital for a pair of catheterization procedures.

“I know a day is going to come when I don’t get better. My heart is going to get me, or my lungs. Or I might get hit by a truck.”

The worst times for him are when he’s too sick to get to his workshop.

“I can’t get here. I can’t be here, and it’s hard. It’s a bitch,” he said, choking up, as he sat in his workshop in a handmade rocking chair he picked up in South Jersey somewhere.

“I’m only happy when I'm here. Sometimes I just come and sit, just to be here. Some days you come down, and all you can do is sweep the floor, because nothing happens.

“But there's other days where you're sitting here ...”

With that, Justin stood up, walked across the room and took something down off the wall that he’d only just begun working on.

It was “Blue,” or what was left of him. This was one of Justin’s earliest critters, but for one reason or another, Justin had become disenchanted with the piece and decided to take it apart, something he routinely does with his work.

Justin held the face in his hands and quietly studied it for a moment. It was a chair bottom, painted a light blue, with a hole drilled for a mouth. Reaching around, he found a tangled oxygen tube, the end of which fit perfectly into the mouth hole. Moving quickly to another corner of the workshop, Justin grabbed what looked like a curved piece of moulding or a brace for a shelf.

The nose.

“That’s something that can’t happen any way but all by itself, and that ain’t me,” Justin said, as the new face began to take shape.

“That’s what’s in the air, what’s in the spirit. People say, ‘What the hell goes through your mind?’ ”

He positioned the nose just where he wanted it, then rummaged for a hammer and some nails.

Bang. Bang. Bang, Bang. Bang.

“Don’t mind me. I hammer like an old lady.”

Thirty-two bangs later, Justin tossed the hammer on the shop table.

“And that’s a done piece,” he announced.

It took him almost as long to find a place for it on the wall as it did for him to bring “Blue” back to life.

There was a little more life in Justin’s face, too, at the end of it.

“I’ve told all my kids, ‘If you find me lying dead on this floor, understand that I was the happiest sonofabitch in the world,’ because this is heaven.

You will automatically receive the TheDailyJournal.com Top 5 daily email newsletter. If you don't want to receive this newsletter, you can change your newsletter selections in your account preferences.